Repairs and old-age categorisations: interactional and categorisation analysis

Charalambidou, Anna ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4579-9859 (2019) Repairs and old-age categorisations: interactional and categorisation analysis. Linguistics Vanguard: A Multimodal Journal for the Language Sciences, 5 (s2) , 20180025. ISSN 2199-174X [Article] (doi:10.1515/lingvan-2018-0025)

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Abstract

This paper examines the use of self-repairs in ascribing old-age categorisations to self and others in casual interactions among friends. Membership categorisation analysis and conversation analysis are employed to analyse self-recorded, everyday conversations of a group of older Greek Cypriot women with a long interactional history. The interactional organisation of old-age labels, and specifically instances of self-repair of age categorisations, reveal that members orient to old-age categories as hierarchically positioned and inference-rich. Members make relevant a very intricate set of expectations of who can be categorised by whom, with what specific age category term and at which context, partly because other-categorisations can also implicate one’s self-categorisation as old. Sequential and categorisation analyses provide a powerful analytical toolkit for the investigation of participants’ local system of self- and other-ascription of explicit -but also implicit- age identities. It is shown that the combination of membership categorisation analysis and conversation analysis can be extended beyond the analysis of turn-generating categories and can be instrumental in analysing flexible, context-shaped and agentively managed category identifications that also have currency beyond the local interactional occasion.

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